The Bastard's Tale

This is not Dame Frevisse in village detective (medieval Miss Marple) mode but out on the stage of history playing a pivotal role (albeit reluctantly) in the plotting and counter-plotting that lay behind the visit of Henry VI to Bury St Edmunds in 1447 and the death there of his uncle and heir, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. It was this death (whether or not he was actually murdered, or suffered a stroke as a result of being arrested and man-handled) that in effect triggered the civil war (the War of the Roses) which devastated England for the next forty years and brought to an end the Plantagenet dynasty and the medieval world (at least as far as England is concerned).

The Bastard in question is Gloucester's son Arteys, whom Gloucester had intended to have declared legitimate (after all, had not the Beauforts been declared legitimate?) but he had left it too late, and now finding Arteys without a friend in the world, Frevisse takes him under her wing. This friendship, however, is ironical, because she is in St Edmundsbury ostensibly to visit her cousin Alice, Suffolk's wife, and in fact to play the spy for Cardinal Beaufort, and these two men, Suffolk and Beaufort, are Gloucester's - and therefore Arteys' - greatest enemies.

Then the player Joliffe turns up (see The Servant's Tale). He is ostensibly performing for the King in a Mystery Play on Shrove Tuesday, but is actually employed by Bishop Beaufort to further his ends and work with Frevisse.

And in the background all through the book is Eleanor Cobham, Gloucester's beautiful wife, who five years earlier had been imprisoned in perpetuity for witchcraft. It is for her, to plead with his nephew the King for her release, that Gloucester goes to Bury St Edmunds in the first place. [A very good retelling of the story of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and condemned witch, is The Duchess and the Doll by Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters, of Cadfael fame), which can be found in The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives. As can, incidentally, a perfect little Dame Frevisse short story, The Midwife's Tale by - of course - Margaret Frazer.]

This, then, is one of those completely successful historical novels that leave you feeling you really were there - and to help there is wonderful cover which actually shows Dame Frevisse and Dame Perpetua with Bishop Pecock and Joliffe at the moment of finding the corpse in the river. (Click on the thumbnail above to see the detail.) Definitely one of Margaret Frazer's best and the book in which Joliffe grows to the point where he had to have his own series, the first of which is A Play of Isaac (to be reviewed in December).